The quickest way to ballast track? Beginners tip

Let’s face it, no one likes ballasting track. It’s soooo time-consuming. But if you’re just starting out and want a quick rather than perfect looking finish there’s a simple answer to your woes.

This is especially if you’re just dabbling with a train set on a temporary work surface. All that faffing around precisely dripping the glue into place and then cleaning the track. There has to be a quicker way.

Luckily, there is.

This handy tip shows what must be the fastest way to fix ballast down and without the mess with glue. Even better, if you later decide you want to pull up the railway this technique makes it a lot easier to do that as it doesn’t glue the ballast in between the sleepers.

The results obviously don’t look as good as the normal way to ballast but for beginners just starting it’s more than good enough.

Btw, if you want to speed up placing the ballast I recommend this ballast spreader. I use it for my OO and N gauge layouts and it saves me hours, if not days.

Finally, in the video the baseboard is lifted around; this obviously isn’t practical in many cases. Instead of lifting the board to pour off excess ballast, you could use a small house-hold cleaner as covered here.

Drop a comment below if you use this technique and let others know how you get on.

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